Ringling Computer Animation Student Receives EA Scholarship

October 6, 2008 - Ringling Computer Animation senior Greg Hettinger has been awarded a $10,000 scholarship from Electronic Arts (EA) – the Randy Pausch Memorial Scholarship. Greg is one of only three interns this summer awarded a scholarship and was selected from over 100 interns nationwide who spent the summer working in EA studios around the country.

While at EA in Salt Lake this summer, Greg worked on various projects for Hasbro products that will appear on Nintendo Wii and DS games being released this fall. For these projects he had to model, texture, animate in-game characters, set up lighting, and composite final renders for cut scenes. He worked in a small group of animators whose main focus was the character animation in the game, as well as many other tasks.

When asked about his project and group experience at EA, Greg replied, “My biggest surprise was that the small group of animators all did more then just animate. EA Salt Lake is one of the smaller EA studios and that allows each person to be able to help out in multiple areas of production. The smaller studio size was really nice because it allowed me to meet most of the people that worked there.”

Greg was assigned a mentor, who was also the lead animator, who showed him around the production pipeline and helped him with all of the projects he was given. There were large production meetings as well as smaller team meetings weekly to check on the status of each person’s progress. By the end of the summer Greg was giving reports on what he did, just like the rest of the team. “Ringling really prepares you to be able to jump right into production and get to work. EA recognizes this and is really good about letting interns do work that has actual significance in their games. Knowing that others are depending on you and that gamers are going to see your work makes you work harder as an intern.”

EA's summer internship program is among the largest in the industry, hosting more than 200 students to work in studios around the world. The 12-week curriculum provides students with a broad overview of the game making process, as well as a solid foundation in specific functional areas like development and marketing.

Randy Pausch Memorial Scholarship

Randy Pausch is known for his development of the Alice software program - a free, open source object-oriented educational programming language. Alice uses a drag and drop interface to create computer animations using 3D models. Alice 3.0 is being underwritten by Electronic Arts.